The pads certainly have the grooves in them that I was refering to. Next question - did you go out on brand new rotors & pads? You will get several opinions from various people regarding this. Here is mine - even if the pads are pre-burnished, the pads and rootrs are not perfectly smooth. These small imperfections can cause isolated 'hot spots' between the pads and the rotors which can lead to scoring like you experienced here. If you have a means to do it, you should try and break-in (no pun intended) the pad and rotor combination before you start to use your brakes to their fullest. This can be done in one of two ways:
1) Put the pads & rotors on a street car, find a deserted highway, and make several stops from speed getting the pads hot enough so you can smell them, then drive around to cool them off.
2) On the track, use the first two or three laps to do the same thing, then drive one or two laps as easy as possible without using the brakes.
You might want to experiment with a different (rotor friendly) pad material like Hawk Blacks. I run Hawk Blues and while they don't score the rotors like in your picture, they do wear them out after several races. Blacks are supposed to be softer than Blues.
Last - your rotors look similar to how my rotors on my old CRX used to look when I ran Showroom Stock in the good old days of OEM brake pads.
You might be suprised at what you will see if you bead blast the rotors or lacking access to a sandblaster, use some 100-150 grit emorry cloth and a lot of elbow grease. Don't use a sanding disk as this will remove too much material and leave and uneven surface. Use a hand sanding block and change the cloth frequently. The scoring may not be as deep as it looks. The grooves might be pad material that has 'picked-up' and deposited itself on the rotors. I was always amazed at how much material I picked up on the rotors and how good they looked after sanding.
BTW - What track did you run at that caused this?
[This message has been edited by Greg Gauper (edited July 09, 2002).]
